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Recently Apex Magazine has seem a few changes, the most obvious of which has brought the online magazine away from its trademark dark science fiction and broadened out to include fantasy as well. Every bit as attention deserving as big time magazines such as Clarkesworld and 
Fantasy, Apex proves it can do all speculative fiction as well as it’s done science fiction in the past.
Issue #19 (December 2010) kicks off with “Radishes” by Nick Wolven, a tale that takes on issues of sustainability and our ability to farm our own food (on alien worlds, for an added complication). Wolven manages to make his world bizarre and alien, but also relatable, and will hopefully remind readers that we aren’t that far from a world famine situation, either in the past or the future.
“Pale, and from a Sea-Wave Rising” by C.S.E. Cooney taps into a much under served area of fantasy fiction, sea creatures, when an undine meets a very logical medical student on a stormy night. One can’t help feeling pulled into this story. Readers will be left with the feeling that they might not have escaped when the story ends.
“At the Core” by Erzebet YellowBoy is this issue’s a reprint. It matches the feel of the other tales wonderfully, telling a semi-modern tale that strongly mirrors a fairy tale, but skirts along genre expectations to be something of its own. The witch and Snow White in this story could be real, which is a sadder and scarier prospect than the idea of elves and fairies meddling in the affairs of mortals.
The poetry offerings for this issue are “Flourless Devil’s Food” by Shweta Narayan, a wicked poetic recipe, and “Cancelled Flight” by W.C. Roberts, a slice of life that cuts quite deep indeed.
